Prison Meals Have Nothing to Do with the Government Shutdown

As the government shutdown drags on, there are a multitude of stories developing that show just how difficult it's making life for government employees. But one story that definitely doesn't add any insight to the situation is one that several major news outlets chose to run on Monday: namely, that prisoners are still being fed.

USA Today, The Washington Post, and NBC News all published overtly race-baiting stories supplied to them by prison-guard unions, all focused on the holiday menus at a handful of prisons.

Prison food has a reputation for being awful. Holiday meals are typically slightly better, but that's saying little.

NBC News ran the story under the headline "Hard to Digest: Inmates Eat Holiday Steak During Shutdown While Prison Workers Go Unpaid." In The Washington Post, it was "I Been Eatin Like a Boss," a line allegedly taken from an e-mail written by a prisoner, though criminal-justice advocates maintain there's "no way in hell" it's real. When the Post first published the story, they included an image of a $24 steak topped with garlic butter from St. Anselm, a Washington, D.C.–based restaurant that also offers radishes with foie gras and $12 deviled eggs with blue crab. By comparison, from the Post's own reporting:

For inmates at [Florida's Coleman Federal Correctional Complex], New Year’s Day lunch was grilled steak, steamed rice with gravy, black-eyed peas, green beans, macaroni and cheese, a choice of garlic biscuits or whole wheat bread and an assortment of holiday pies.

The feast—planned long before the shutdown began, according to the Bureau of Prisons—was served by not-particularly-festive prison guards and workers who have no idea when they will receive their next paycheck, but have to come to work anyway because they work in crucial public safety jobs.

"The feast." Rice and gravy, mac and cheese, and a choice between biscuit and bread is a feast. In USA Today's coverage, they even clarify toward the end of the story that the meal didn't even include steak, just roast beef. But they and every other outlet covering the story still used "steak" in the headline. NBC News even had the audacity to claim that staffers were more upset because "the working inmates were still drawing government paychecks for their prison jobs, which include painting buildings, cooking meals and mowing lawns." Many prisoners are never paid for their work, because slave labor is constitutionally legal as long as it's performed by inmates, and when they are paid it's often less than $1 an hour.

For decades, the single uniting theme in white supremacist propaganda has been the idea that African-Americans live high off the government hog while “working class” whites struggle to survive. It was the subtext of a now-infamous 1976 Ronald Reagan speech (New York Times, 2/4/76) when the former California governor accused a “strapping young buck” of using food stamps to buy T-bone steak. The narrative being advanced by the Post and others here is simply a slightly more liberal 2.0 version of this.

Johnson goes on to suggest that this is an attempt to save face and paint prison guards as martyrs, pointing out that this story came out days after a damning federal report documented unchecked sexual abuse and violence against inmates, with Coleman featured prominently in The New York Times's coverage.

There’s an obviously appealing narrative to this story that will generate a lot of clicks: specifically, that Trump is, yet again, hurting the working class by spitefully latching on to whatever idea he’s obsessing over at the time. But prisoners are not the ones shutting down the government or delaying the guards' paychecks. Serving them their usual Oliver Twist gruel won't get those workers paid any faster. And pretending that they're freeloaders lavished with goodies is fucking unconscionable.

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